Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories Micro Review

2 years after Square Enix's surprise hit, Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories came out on the Gameboy Advance. The story picks up where Sora donald and Goofy are still trying to find Riku and Mickey,
then one night a strange figure in a black coat tells Sora to follow him as he might know where his friends are; at Castle Oblivion. So Sora enters Castle Oblivion and for some reason Sora has lost all of his memories, and have been rewritten by a witch named Namine', who looks an awful lot like Kairi without the red hair, and basically switches places with Kairi as Sora's friend. So eventually Sora reunites with Donald and Goofy as they  navigate through Castle Oblivion and it's 16 floors, revisiting the world's he went to in the first game, fighting off against a mysterious group called Organization XIII and a new horde of enemies; The Nobodies. Along the way, he regains some of the old memories he had lost, and he also finds out that Riku is there, He also has his memory erased too, so all the freaking progress he made at the end of the game is forgotten, so we are back to Riku being a confused person being bad. So at points of the game, we get to fight Riku several times . The story climaxes with Sora and his friends including Riku remembering everything. Sora realizes that Namine is not Kairi, and fights the leader of the organization; Marluxiene. Riku leaves and finds Mickey, yeah they lost each other's paths. Sora wins his fight against ORG XIII, but they will be back, Namine puts Sora, donald, and goofy in a sleeping pod... setting up for the next game. But the game doesn't end there, for the first time ever, you get to play as Riku in the second quest. Once you beat both quests, you get a mandatory secret ending.. hinting at the next game.

This game is not Kingdom Hearts 2, it's a midquel. The story is quite simple.. it introduces the enemies that gamers will face off against in the next game; Organization XIII and The Nobodies. The story is weaker in this game because it feels like a filler game but in actuality it is a important part so that you can understand what's coming next, in other words it's just a IN BETWEEN game to tide gamers for the next game, but that is acceptable because it's a smaller game, not a big box console game. Since the GBA is limited in power, so Square Enix decides to rework the battle system and gave it a face lift; you battle the enemies with a deck of cards. They broke the cards down into 3 catergories; Attack, Magic, and Summoning. You get more cards as you progress through the game from beating enemies and treasures and also buying packs from the moogle stores across the game. Each card has a different power point ranging from 0-9, you can combine cards to make a powerful combo such as sliding dash, and arcs arconum from the first game.

The combat is surprisingly good here, at first it takes a while to get use to it, but once you get it down.. it's a fun handheld game. The music is... average. They are just 16 bit variations of the music in the first game excluding the music in Castle Oblivion. The graphics are very impressive for a GBA game, the animations are fluent and pretty. The cutscenes are told in text boxes, which is fine.. but I don't like it when I have to go through the same dialogue over and over again if I lose to a boss a thousand times, it hurts my eyes and my thumbs. There is no voice acting in this game, once again not a problem for me because it's a GBA game. The game is surprisingly long, it will take you a little while to beat it, just like any old RPG game, which I love. The dysfunctional camera system is nowhere to be found in this game, thank god.

Even though the story is weaker here, I have to say it; This game is better than the first one. I love the card battle system, the graphics are super impressive, and the game has lots of replay value, plus it is portable and you can play it anywhere!

Score 4.2/5

Editorial (I know that they start losing their memories the further they went in Castle Oblivion, just a little rusty with this game and it's story)